BRs representing paragraphs considered harmful

[murata2makoto]

At least in Japan, there are quite a few EPUB publications that contain BR tags (not P tags) for representing paragraphs (probably with a leading ideographic space character at the beginning of each "paragraph"). But screen readers do not recognize such "paragraphs". Users complain to developers of screen readers.

Is this a common problem? We are wondering if this issue can be addressed by a new value of the accessibilityFeature property or ACE.

[mattgarrish]

I know it was a problem early on in the transition to ebooks, but I haven't heard complaints about it in a long time. It wasn't just a problem for paragraphs, either, but was used for lists and other structures, too.

I would expect it to be considered a failure of WCAG success criterion 1.3.1. Using br tags to mimic paragraphs fails the info and relationships requirement as the "paragraphs" only exist visually when created with br tags.

It's hard to reliably check for automatically, however, outside of maybe looking for br tags as direct children of the body tag. You would expect br tags in line-based content like poetry, so too strict checking could lead to false positives.